If there’s one modern phrase guaranteed to make me foam at the mouth it’s “user-friendly”. Everything’s user-friendly these days, from your school, hospital, supermarket to the myriad electronic gadgets without which you are a pariah. The term seems to be shorthand for “informal to the point of sloppiness”.
I knew a teacher of the despised “old school” who taught in a school where he was proudly informed by a head of department “we are a user-friendly department”. In this particular case the term meant the children called the shots.
So user-friendly was the department the SATs results were utterly abysmal in English (at a grammar school). The head of department consulted boys about how to rectify the problem. “Get Mr ... to teach us,” came the reply. “He makes us keep quiet and makes us work.”
Look at what being user-friendly has done to hospitals, where making patients happy replaced making them safe.
When I was young, during the War, I spent years in hospital at a time when antibiotics were not routinely available, those magic bullets that were going to cure all ills. Over every ward lay the dreaded spectre of infection. Any wound that became infected could be a death sentence.
Wards were constantly cleaned, supervised by a matron feared by all. Then magic antibiotics became available and infections were miraculously cured, however, sloppiness slipped in.
Infections were no longer a death sentence so hospitals had to become welcoming places with no horrible smell of disinfectant.
It became open house with visitors welcomed at all hours swarming around beds, wearing outdoor clothes, sitting on beds – anybody’s bed – bringing sandwiches and takeaways.
Nurses wore uniforms to and from work, obsessive handwashing routines were forgotten in the comforting belief that antibiotics would soon see off germs.
Only they didn’t and a new spectre lies over our wards now – that of the superbugs. Could it be that user-friendly, as a mantra, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, after all?
